28. Diem

28

Diem

W hen the line went dead, I cursed and tossed my phone on the desk. It skidded across the surface and went over the other side, landing with a crash on the floor. Fucking headstrong Tallus was off playing detective hero on his own without a goddamn clue in the world. This was my fault. I’d given him too much power. I’d put him in charge of the case out of a misguided sense that it was not a case at all. We were no longer working as a team. We weren’t even working on the same theories.

I zigged. He zagged.

I wanted to calmly gather information. He wanted to slink, spy, and chase leads before they were leads.

Maybe I’d spent too much time emphasizing we weren’t partners.

Maybe it was because I couldn’t express my thoughts clearly enough. Story of my life. God knows, instead of running screaming the other night after hearing what I had to say, Tallus had taken me to bed. What did that say about the man?

He was either stupid or resilient.

Maybe it was because I’d treated this whole goddamn case like a joke and let him run wild as I lumbered along, obeying his every command and not injecting an opinion often enough.

Either way, I had information on hand that qualified as suspicious. I didn’t know how it related to the eleven dead people, but enough years as a PI told me to warily keep digging because I was getting closer to something big, and I knew not to ignore my gut.

The question was, did I rescue Tallus from the psychic before I found the key piece, or did I let him have his fun and do this on my own?

Logically, I should leave him. What information did I have?

One of the kids arrested for dealing drugs used to work for Janek. The naturopath told me her ex-employees name when I’d returned to the store, and Kitty had confirmed he was one of the boys they’d hauled into the precinct on Wednesday night from the cemetery beside Rowena’s house.

Brodie Newall, whose mother had worked at the same fair where Rowena and Hilty had performed their notorious show before getting arrested for the suspicious death of two men.

It didn’t mean they knew each other. But if they had, could they have stayed in contact? Was the mother of a drug dealer who worked in a supplement shop beside Hilty a plausible connection?

It seemed flimsy when I said it out loud. Except no matter how many times I did the math, Tallus’s fucked-up case always came back to drugs. No other explanation fit. I’d been saying it since day one.

No matter what the autopsies showed, the people who had died had to have been mixing some unknown, untested substance with their usual prescriptions. The combination had an adverse effect on their systems, killing them outright or altering their personalities so they appeared off-balance, edgy, and not themselves. They all had preexisting conditions that supported this theory.

What that substance might have been, I had no idea.

I couldn’t discount the random suicides, either. They might not have died of unexpected heart conditions, but they had been acting strangely in the days leading up to their deaths, another indicator of drugs. One had been medicated for depression. Was it important?

Not for the first time, I wished I had a doctor in my pocket to bounce some ideas around, but my charming personality had burned those bridges years ago, and I’d never built new ones.

Drawing my iPad forward, I continued searching into Sandra Morgenstern and Milton Newall, the names that had appeared on Brodie Newall’s birth certificate.

Milton was a dead end. He had died in a traffic accident in 2008. I found a brief write-up detailing the incident and an obituary that mentioned neither a wife nor a son.

Sandra interested me most since there seemed to be a loose connection between her, Rowena, and Hilty via the fair. For the second time, I typed her name into a search engine. Sandra Morgenstern had no social media platforms. Apart from a dated, unclear picture of her from back in high school—a newspaper notation mentioning a tree-planting event, where she posed with at least twenty other students with shovels around a sapling—I couldn’t find a recent photograph. The woman didn’t have a driver’s license or health card in the system either. No passport on file. That in itself raised red flags.

It was like she no longer existed. Yet, she did or had when Brodie Newall was born.

An underhanded credit search showed an abysmal score. The woman was in debt to her eyeballs. Bank-canceled credit cards dating back to 2017. Foreclosure on her house in 2018. She filed for bankruptcy in late 2018 as well, a month after she lost the house.

Then nothing. Poof. Gone.

Frustrated, I entered Rowena Fitspatrick’s name instead, knowing already I would be faced with all kinds of trash from her past. I focused on the arrest from eighty-six, seeking articles about the fair where she and Hilty had performed.

Eventually, I found the connection I was looking for. A throwaway piece, written after the judge had dismissed the charges against Rowena and Hilty. The local newspaper interviewed a woman named Sandy M, seeking an opinion about the couple who had roomed with her during the show, asking whether she believed they had been wrongfully accused.

“Roommates. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

But how did it fit?

Roommates. Sandra had a baby with Milton. Milton died. Sandra ends up with severe money problems. She contacts an old friend? A skilled con artist. A son dealing drugs.

I reached for my phone to call Tallus, but it was still on the floor. Too lazy to get up and grab it, I drummed my fingers on the desk as I twisted new theories. I needed a smoke, but I pushed the craving aside, ignoring it, still pissed I’d fucked up and broken my clean streak.

What I really needed was a recent picture of Sandra Morgenstern. Why was that proving difficult to find? Unless she’d gone out of her way to stay off the radar.

But why?

Hiding from an abusive husband didn’t fit. Milton was dead.

I sat bolt upright. Unless, with the help of someone knowledgeable, she’d changed her identity to hide from creditors.

Someone knowledgeable, like an old roommate who had done it before.

“Goddammit. Who are you, Sandra?”

Reluctantly, I retrieved my phone, but I didn’t call Tallus. I called the one person who might be willing to help me identify Sandra Morgenstern. Someone I hadn’t spoken to in many years. Perhaps the only person in law enforcement who didn’t hold a grudge against me. A man who had spent long hours in a car beside me every day, trying to figure out what made me tick.

He answered on the third ring with a gruff, no-nonsense, “Wagner. What do you want?”

“I need a favor.”

A long pause followed my statement. When my old partner, Constable Vernon Wagner from 32 District, spoke again, he lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Krause? Is that you?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Vern laughed, and it was the enormous belly laugh I remembered from our days on street patrol. “How the hell are you?”

“Getting by.” I didn’t have time to chat, but I knew it was one of those times when pushing for answers wouldn’t get me anywhere.

“I heard you’re running your own show. Got a PI gig or something. Is that right?”

“I do. I prefer being my own boss.”

“You never did get along with authority. I never worked with a bigger pain in the ass in my life. You were such a jaded prick. I hardly knew what to do with you.”

“Yep. Haven’t changed.”

Vern howled, his booming voice echoing down the line. “No shit.”

We’d butted heads on more than one occasion. Vern was older by ten or eleven years, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t mold the rookie into a decent cop. I’d persistently bucked the rules and hadn’t learned to control my temper. At that time, the world had been out to get me, and I was still fighting back. I had been nothing more than a punk-ass kid, barely a year out of rehab, and still angry to my core.

Still was most days.

Regardless of the countless times Vern had reported my behavior to our superior, no matter that it was likely because of Vern that I’d been put on probation and moved to headquarters for desk duty a few short weeks before my disastrous sortie from the department, I’d never hated the guy.

“I need a favor,” I said again, cutting to the chase.

“Oh yeah? What’s it gonna cost me? Is it legal?”

“It’s not il legal.”

Vern chuckled. “That ain’t sayin’ much. Lay it on me.”

“A few guys from the old crew arrested a kid named Brodie Newall in York Cemetery last week. He was held overnight and released the next morning.”

“And how do you know that?”

“A little bird told me.”

“Uh-huh. Keep going.”

“I’m curious if he left on his own the following morning or if someone picked him up.”

“How the fuck should I know?”

“Ask Anderson. Is he still at the front desk?”

“Yeah. That old fart will never leave. And if I ask him, then what?”

“If the kid was picked up by his mother or a woman in that age bracket, I was hoping you could send me a still from the security camera in the lobby.”

Vern whistled. “Wanna tell me why?”

“No.”

“I don’t hear from you for… What? Three, four years, and you aren’t even gonna invite me out for a beer in exchange for help? Don’t tell me you’ve been kicked out of all the bars in the city.”

“I quit drinking.”

“Since when?”

Since never, but Vern didn’t have to know that. The point was I didn’t want to drink. Going to a bar and having a cold one with my old partner risked taking me down a road I didn’t want to travel.

“Tell you what,” Vern said. “I’ll talk to Anderson. If I find something worth passing along, you owe me a steak dinner and conversation.”

“Deal.”

“When do you need it?”

“Yesterday.”

“Christ. Lemme see what I can do.”

Again, I debated calling Tallus, but if he was in with the psychic, he wouldn’t answer. Better to wait and see what Vern discovered.

It was a long eighteen minutes before my phone rang.

“Give me your email,” Vern said in place of a hello.

I rhymed it off as I pulled up my account on the iPad, ready to receive.

“Anyone asks, you didn’t get this from me.”

“Never heard of ya.”

“Barberian’s on Friday night. Can you swing it?”

Fuck me. Of course he’d pick the most expensive steak restaurant in the city. “Yeah. What time?”

“Seven thirty. I’ll meet you there.”

We hung up as Vern’s email hit my inbox. He’d done away with a trivial greeting. The body of the email contained a still-framed picture pulled from the front desk security camera and dated the previous Thursday morning.

The camera was positioned behind the clerk’s desk and was aimed directly at the civilian standing at the counter, so it offered an unobstructed view of the person’s face.

And I knew that face. I’d seen her before, and her name wasn’t Sandra Morgenstern .